Poésies choisies de André Chénier
Fragment Ii
L. 343. D'eux-même. See note to p. 42, l. 15.
L. 346. Io. The daughter of the river Inachus. Zeus, having fallen in no French reader of to-day would notice the word. It is a good old French word. We are thus made aware that it had been falling into disuse in the seventeenth century (when it occurs several times in La Fontaine and others), and especially in the eighteenth. E. reserene occurs in Temple.
FRAGMENT II
This was to be an episode. Alonzo d'Ercilla was a Spanish poet of the sixteenth century who, in a poem entitled Araucania, sang the conquest, achieved by the Spaniards, of the country south of Chili.
Ll. 24. aréneuse, an old, somewhat out-of-the-way word. It occurs in Rabelais.
L. 28. A climax inspired by Virgil, Aen. v. 319.
L. 52. le Dauphin. The Dolphin, a northern constellation, Delphinius.
L. 53. la Couronne. The crown, Corona borealis.
IV. L'ART D'AIMER.
Ll. 6, 7. Et qui pense... Il pense... This is a feature of old syntax. Instances of the construction occur in the seventeenth century: 'Qui dit prude, il dit laide,' LA FONTAINE. Sometimes the repetition may be made with a demonstrative pronoun: 'Qui ne mourrait pour conserver son honneur, celui-là serait infâme, PASCAL.
L. 8. un durable sillon. Cf. '... having driven his plough through a morass which must close again behind it.' Froude, Oceana, iii.
Ll. 29-34. Alpheus, in Elis (Peloponnesus), 'that renowned flood, so often sung, Divine Alpheus, who, by secret sluice, Stole under seas to meet his Arethuse.'—Milton, Arcades, 29 ff. The nymph Arethusa, one of Diana's nymphs, was by the goddess changed into a fountain, to save her from the pursuit of Alpheus, a hunter, while Alpheus himself became a river. Enna is a town in Sicily. The fact that the river Alpheus ran in a subterranean channel at several points in its course probably gave rise to the myth.